My daughter Ally is studying for the GREs. Despite graduating with a BA in Linguistics and a near-perfect GPA, her vocabulary is:

• a. wanting
• b. wanton
• c. wonton
• d. pathetic

So I’ve been helping.

Or maybe not. It depends on whether you consider it helpful to reel off synonyms whose meanings are equally obscure.

“Perfunctory,” I coach Ally. “You know, pro forma.”

She rolls her eyes before returning to GRE for Dummies. “How about diffident?” she asks.

“You know, it’s like . . . reticent ,” I stammer. “I know what it means, I just don’t know how to explain it.”

“How do you even pronounce p-h-l-e-g-m-a-t-i-c?” Ally sighs.

“Phlegmatic,” I boast. “It either means calm or its opposite. I can never remember which. But isn’t phlegm related to bile, one of the dark humors? Oh, yeah, I think it means angry.”

For the record, it does not. Nor is Ally remaining phlegmatic.

“How about effete?” she asks, agitation rising in her voice.

“Hmmm. Like ‘Effete intellectual.’ Maybe elitist or snobby?” I venture.

Wrong again. Apparently Vice President Spiro Agnew was not back-hand-complimenting people of a certain persuasion on their braininess, but accusing them of “lacking in wholesome vigor; worn out.”

It occurs to me that not only am I a vocabulary snob: I am a vocabulary fraud. Like a smart person who passes for literate, I’ve been pretending all these years.

What new fad did I fall victim to during my formative years in the 60s? My ability to ferret out close-but-no-cigar meaning from the context suggests a whole-language approach. Probably some hippie-dippy, out-of-the-box, newfangled pedagogy. What I remember, though, is literally learning out of the box—pulling those self-paced, color-coded flashcards from the big Scholastics box on the low tables of grade school. Kill-and-drill. But I loved it! I was a straight-A student, adept at that quintessential secret of success—faking it.

Now, as I help Ally with her own kill-and-drill cramming, even the words I’m sure of turn out to be wrong. Take tenuous, for example, as in, “She has a tenuous grasp on reality.”

But the only definition GRE for Dummies offers up is: “thin; slim.” As in, “I wish I were tenuous.”

Hmmm . . . maybe not. But I’m excited to have learned new and proper usage. Now I can say with full confidence that my vocabulary is pretty:

• a. tenuous
• b. slim
• c. effete
• d. pathetic